Last week, Scott Jangro wrote a great piece comparing the Disqus API and Javascript plugins for blog integration.
Most people would just scratch their heads and say “so what?” but there are some pretty big implications for the behavior of the commenting plugin and how search engines see blog comments, etc.
“Search engines cannot see the comments rendered with the Javascript plugin. They do see the comments displayed via the API version of the plugin.
The Javascript implementation does have its benefits. In addition to ease of integration and feature updates, the fact that comment text is unavailable to search engines means that comment spam is rendered completely ineffective. There are other ways to accomplish this, and for now, I’m uncomfortable with using a full Javascript implementation.”
Plus, the Javascript plugin has all the new features that Disqus has been rolling out compared to the API plugin which has been seemingly neglected lately.
However, according to a tweet from Disqus’ Daniel Ha, that looks like things will be changing soon.
I look forward to switching over to the API plugin myself!